Birds in your area - 2016

Ireland is a wonderful country for birds. There are a few reasons birds like it here. The main one is that Ireland is an island. This means that we have a coastline and some birds love coastlines because they can swim and feed on fish and other things on the seashore.

Another reason they like it here is that it is a good resting place to drop in to when they are flying long distances.
Sometimes they just stay for a few days and sometimes they stay a few months. Birds that live at sea a lot of the time come to shelter in Ireland when there is a storm coming.

So you can see that Ireland is important for birds. We should continue to make it a nice place for them to live here with us.

Here are some things birds do that show us how they share our world with us
Birds eat seeds and berries; they perch on trees and build nests in hedges, bushes and trees. They also build nests in fields (sometimes on the ground) and on cliffs.

Places to live or habitats are important
Birds will die if they cannot find a place to live or rest. The place where a living thing lives is called a habitat. It is very important that there are plenty of habitats in Ireland. We must give living things places to live.

A world without birds would not be a happy place. We would miss their song and miss seeing them flying across the sky or landing on trees near us.

Do you have a favorite bird song? Mine is the Blackbird.

Because birds fly they have great freedom to move around quickly. This also means that we can see a great variety or biodiversity of birds in Ireland.

Birdwatchers
Some people spend a lot of time looking at birds.They are called birdwatchers and usually they carry binocular (bins for short) and a camera with a zoom lens. They also carry a notebook to write down the names of birds they see and some Nature Notes about how many they saw and what the weather was like when they saw them.
Birdwatchers get to know the names of birds by looking closely at how a bird flies, its shape and colours and its song. Learning to know a bird from its song it great because you can get to know it's there before you see it.

Birdwatchers in Ireland love birds so much that they meet and go looking at birds together. They have an organisation called Bird Watch Ireland. There are probably some Bird Watch Ireland people near your school. They will talk to your teacher and your class about birds.

Select Birds

The Long Eared owl. The eyes are large to catch as much light at night as possible and they are right out at the front of the head to help it see in 3D like humans. This means that they can catch things when flying because they can see more accurately.Thanks to Wikipedia for the use of the photograph.